According to Pungas, the change concerns those people who did not update their data after moving places or who were requested to remove a certain address as their place of residence from the register by the owner of the apartment or house. As a result, the person’s place of residence in the register was specified to the city (city district in Tallinn) or rural municipality, for example, Viljandi city, Lasnamäe district of Tallinn or Saaremaa municipality. A total of 33,500 people have such addresses in the population register. Approximately a half of these are the citizens of other countries who have apparently left Estonia.
Registering one’s place of residence is simple: you can do it in a couple of minutes, using the eesti.ee web page. Another option is contacting the local government in person, by post or e-mail. Enel Pungas recommends registering the exact data concerning the place of residence as early as the next following days. “It is not reasonable to postpone changing one’s data any longer, or people could be in for unpleasant surprises in January when they lose the public services associated with the place of residence, for example, a childcare place, free public transport, childbirth allowance or renewing one’s driving licence.”
In the future, local governments will have the right to specify the data concerning the individual’s place of residence so that the data correspond to the actual place of a person’s residence. Under the new act, the local government will be able to enter a person’s address of residence in the population register even if the dwelling owner has not given consent thereto, but it has been determined that the person actually lives at the said address.
Both under the effective act and under the new act, every individual shall be responsible for ensuring the correctness of the data concerning their own and their children’s address in the population register. The effective act establishes that a person must update the data concerning their place of residence within 30 days after settling in the new residence, and the timeframe for mandatory notification will be decreased to 14 days after 1 January 2019.
Olja Kivistik, Ministry of the Interior, December 2018